Movie Review: It Follows
It Follows Movie Review: The Film has generic conversations, and many quiet moments, even as horror keeps knocking at the door.
IT FOLLOWS Movie Review
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
Starring Maika Monroe, Lili Sepe, Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi
Somewhere around the time when cellphones weren’t ubiquitous but televisions with small antennas atop them were, a girl sees something, runs out of her house and hours later is found twisted to a horrible and bloody death.
It follows there must be more blood and gore in the wake.
That’s where David Robert Mitchell surprises you. It Follows (nominated for a Cannes award) is a surprisingly sympathetic and surprisingly gentle look at five teenage friends caught in the middle of an unnamed horror and their efforts to handle it without involving the elders, who remain clueless as many parents before them.
This “thing” can come in any shape and form, and anywhere. “It” gets passed on if you sleep with someone, with the latter now more in danger than you. And “it” remains more a deeply disturbing imminent threat rather than a more immediate one.
Jay (Monroe), her sister Kelly (Sepe), and their friends Paul (Gilchrist) and Yara (Luccardi) practically live in each other’s homes. Jay, however, has been spending more and more time with her new mysterious boyfriend. Then one night Jay goes out with him, they have sex for the first time in his car, and she comes home traumatised. He has told her and shown her what has been haunting him, and said “it” would haunt her now on and kill her unless she took precautions.
Surrounded by her protective circle, the beautiful Jay who all girls love and all boys like tries to find a solution, including all of them moving into a beach house owned by an attractive neighbour. They have generic conversations, and many quiet moments, even as horror keeps knocking at the door.
It’s within the quiet moments though that Mitchell’s film comes alive, about teens living in a world quite separate from parents, clueless about their parents’ fears, convinced about their own abilities, weighing their choices (with sex a glaringly obvious one, given the story) and, at the bottom of it, really honourable people helping out each other.
While towards the end, It Follows does become irksome, appearing repetitive despite its short length, one can take away that heartwarming thought.
Source:: Indian Express
